The instant invention relates generally to mailing machines having a postage meter which prints, postage indicia on tape, and particularly to such a mailing machine in which the postage meter also prints advertisements using ad plates having different lengths.
Prior art mailing machine have long been well known and widely accepted in all forms of commercial establishments from the largest of high volume mailers down to the smallest size businesses and professional offices. Broadly speaking, a mailing machine consists of a postage meter which prints postage indicia on an envelope or a strip of tape, and a feed base for feeding successive envelopes or a strip of tape past the postage meter, and ejecting either for further handling. Mailing machines have been available in a variety of sizes in terms of rate of operation and level of technical sophistication and automation. Thus, for example, a machine found in the mailing room of a high-volume mailer such as a credit card billing office might process several thousand envelopes per hour, with automatic feeding, flap moistening, sealing and stacking. Similarly, a machine found in a small, professional office might require manually feeding one envelope at a time into the feed base and do nothing more than print the postage indicia on the envelope and eject it.
Obviously, there are many variations between the extremes described above, and a large variety of machines have been designed and marketed to meet the mailing requirements of establishments whose mailing volume falls between these extremes. One important characteristic of machines falling in this category is that they have the capability of printing postage indicia either directly on envelopes as they are fed along a feed path through the mailing machine, or on a strip of tape, either gummed or adhesive backed, which is dispensed from the mailing machine for an operator to apply to an envelope which cannot be fed along the normal feed path to the printing device. This is a feature normally not incorporated into the smallest of mailing machines for the reason that the cost of infrequently used tape feeding mechanisms would not be attractive to such low volume mailers.
Thus, the bulk of the development of tape feed mechanisms for mailing machines has been in the mid-range size, and particularly in machines in which it is anticipated that the user not only generates a fairly large volume of regular mail which can be automatically fed through the mailing machine, but also a substantial amount of mail which is either too large or bulky to be fed through the mailing machine and therefore must have postage applied manually, either in the form of stamps or postage indicia printed on tape. Assuming that the user wishes to avoid the use of stamps, it becomes highly advantageous to incorporate a functionally efficient and cost effective tape handling mechanism into the mailing machine.
In many cases the printing die of the postage meter includes not only the die to print the postage indicia but also a die that will print an ad adjacent the postage indicia. The size, i.e. the length, of the ad will vary from ad to ad, and thus the amount of space needed on a section of postage tape will vary. Clearly, if the space required for the ad is significantly less than the length of the postage tape, there is a wasting of postage tape since a significant amount will be blank. In mailing machine tape feed mechanisms employed today, either the length of the tape sections is fixed, resulting in considerable wasting of tape, or the operator selects a length of tape before printing, which is clumsy. Moreover, in either case, the tape feed mechanism is unable to consistently monitor the presence of the lead edge of tape, so that appropriate cutting of the tape is not possible on a consistent basis.
The instant invention therefore provides a functionally efficient tape feed mechanism for a mailing machine which determines the length of the printed indicia and any accompanying ad and then cuts the appropriate length of tape consistent with the printed indicia and any accompanying ad so that no more tape than is necessary is used.